[H]ardNews 2nd Edition - Connected Edition

180 Channels & Something's On:

ArsTechnica has an interesting article about Cisco Systems teaming up with Red Bull Cheever Racing to provide wireless communications to their IndyCars. 180 Channels of telemetry is some serious data density.

"The Cisco Wi-Fi solution has dramatically improved the amount of information we can get out of a race car," said Eddie Cheever, a Formula One racing veteran and owner of the Red Bull Cheever team. "And it's also allowed us to reorganize our method of communicating, so we can get access to and analyze information much faster."

Wireless Confusion:

Speaking this week from the Wireless Connectivity World (WiCon) Conference, Mike McCamon executive director of the Ultra Wideband Forum described wireless standards as a complete and utter mess much like the 1990's with Token Ring and Ethernet confounding end users.

"There are a number of incompatible networking technologies, such as Bluetooth, Near Field Communication (NFC), Ultrawideband, Wi-Fi and ZigBee, which have some similar uses but are better tuned for different situations."

Earthlink Firmware?

Earthlink's R&D has released an experimental firmware for Linksys WRT54G routers, while not officially an EarthLink or Linksys product its similar to OpenWrt and enables the WRT54G to acquire a publicly routeable /64 IPv6 prefix, provide IPv6 addresses from that prefix to hosts on the home network, and route IPv6 home network traffic to the greater IPv6 Internet.

"The firmware modification does not affect the ability of the WRT54G to support IPv4 traffic as it was designed to do. IPv4 and IPv6 traffic coexist on the home network side by side without interfering with each other. This dual IPv4/IPv6 support makes the WRT54G with the added IPv6 functionality a perfect model IPv6 transition device."

Municipal Wi-Fi:

Cnet has a two page reality check on various municipal plans to implement citywide Wi-Fi networks.

"While it would cost about $2,000 to $3,000 per household to run fiber, wireless can be deployed for about $20 to $25 per household. Philadelphia has about 590,000 households, according to the 2000 Census. Using that number, the city figures it will cost roughly $10 to $15 million to reach every household, according to its business plan"